Weitz - A Century of Genocide

a century of genocide

a century of genocide

UTOPIAS OF RACE AND NATION

Eric D. Weitz

with a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2003 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

Eighth paperback printing, and first paperback printing with a new preface by the author, 2015

Paperback ISBN: 978-0-691-16587-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930402

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Sabon and Universe Condensed 57

Printed on acid-free paper.

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Printed in the United States of America

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abbreviations

Preface to the New Paperback Edition

When I first began to write A Century of Genocide shortly before the turn into the new millennium, the effort to understand genocides in a comparative framework was still highly controversial. The Historikerstreit (historians quarrel) in West Germany was only a decade behind us, and its consequences still reverberated. In that heated public and academic debate, Jrgen Habermas, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, and many other leading lights of the German intellectual world took to task their colleague Ernst Nolte for relativizing and trivializing the Holocaust. Nolte had compared the Holocaust with the Stalinist terrors and other inhumane acts committed by communist regimes. For Nolte, the European twentieth century was defined by the communist threat. Germany rightly feared the aggressive designs of the Soviet Union. Everything the Nazis did was in response; every terror act of the Third Reich had been presaged by Stalin. The Nazis only adopted the techniques of repression forged in the Soviet Union. Nolte argued that communist regimes were even more bloodthirsty than the Third Reich, implying that the Nazis were not all that bad or at least not all that distinctive when viewed through a comparative lens.

Habermas and others put to rest these specious arguments of Noltes, which at best were based on a silly chronological determinismthe Soviets did it first, hence the Nazis only responded in kindand at worst were a deliberate effort to call into question the enormity of the Nazi effort to annihilate the Jews and the Holocausts stature as a symbol of absolute evil. The broader intellectual impact, however, was deleterious. Noltes reprehensible diminution of the meaning of the Holocaust made it very difficult to undertake comparative analyses, since every venture into this terrain was immediately castigated as a similar relativization of the Holocaust.

Ten years on, in 1997, just when I started work on A Century of Genocide, another public and academic storm had a similar effect. Published first in France and edited by the ex-communist and ex-Maoist Stphane Courtois, The Black Book of Communism provided intricate Courtois, like Nolte, practiced history by body count. Communism had many more victims to account for, hence it was necessarily worse than Nazism. Case closed.

The impact of The Black Book, at least at first, was not to stimulate serious, systematic comparative analysis of dictatorial systems. The triumphalist tone assumed by Courtois and many of his collaboratorswho often sounded like secular sinners seeking penance for their communist pastclosed off the possibilities for comparison. Notably, Courtois and Nolte largely ignored the nuanced and sophisticated historical and social science studies of the Third Reich and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Increasingly, these works analyzed the internal workings of the state and state-society interactions as part of the effort to explain the repressions and terror and, in the case of the Third Reich, the genocide committed by the regimes. Instead, Nolte and Courtois engaged in polemics that masked as scholarship.

Not rarely, when I first began to present lectures based on the research I was conducting for A Century of Genocide and argued that comparative analysis was the best way to understand the prevalence of genocide in the twentieth century, I was accused of either relativizing the Holocaust la Nolte or of parroting The Black Book with its blanket condemnation of communism. Fortunately, I was not alone in the comparative venture. In the mid-1990s a group of North American scholars had founded what is now known as the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS). Their touchstone was the pioneering work of the South African-born sociologist Leo Kuper and his book, Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century.

In these first works in the field now known as genocide studies, the major focus was on the singular nature of genocidal events, in particular their origins and implementation and the political and moral question of how they might be prevented in the future.

Then, around 2000, the research took off, helped along by a panoply of newly-founded journals, conferences, and associations, notably, in addition to the IAGS, the International Network of Genocide Scholars, the Workshop on Armenian-Turkish Studies, and the Journal of Genocide Studies and other journals as far afield as Germany and Japan. We have learned an enormous amount about particular cases. The pacesetter for the research has been work on the Armenian Genocide and the genocide of the Herero and Nama of German Southwest Africa (today Namibia) between 1904 and 1908, the first two cases of the twentieth century, along with the Rwandan Genocide. It takes courage to work on the topic, but there is now a critical mass of Turkish scholars who do so. The evidence for the genocide has become so overwhelming that the Turkish states protestations look increasingly like the hollowed-out communist ideology of the Brezhnev era in the Soviet Union.